Maybe for a While
by CitronPresse
Summary: Post season 5 finale. Mark and Lexie broke up. One evening, three months later, Lexie visits Mark's house. Pairing: Mark/Lexie.


_And now we're grown up orphans  
That never knew their names  
We don't belong to no one  
That's a shame  
You could hide beside me  
Maybe for a while  
And I won't tell no one your name_

_**Name**_, The Goo Goo Dolls

* * *

It rained most of the day. Tonight, though, it stopped and some pale, half-assed Washington sunshine is trying to light up his puddle-strewn yard.

Mark focuses on the puddles and the water hanging in drops from the leaves. He doesn't usually notice these things much, but he has to look at something that isn't Lexie while he gets a grip on the emotions that threaten to derail him when he opens his front door and sees her standing there. Nature makes for a convenient displacement activity.

"Hey," she says. The slight trembling in her voice outmaneuvers the friendly enthusiasm she's going for. Her nervousness gets his attention, allows him just enough bravado to look into her eyes, and she immediately looks down at the ground. But in seconds she's peering up under her eyelashes, trying to smile. "It stopped raining." She shrugs and her cheeks redden a little.

Fuck, she's pretty.

"I guess it did," he says and glances at the sky. There ought to be better things to say to each other after three months of barely talking.

"Derek . . . " A gulp rises and falls in her throat. "He gave me your address. So I . . . can I come in?"

"Sure," he says (he'd already decided the answer before she stammered out the question) and opens the door a little wider, standing aside for her, unable now to take his eyes off her as she steps uncertainly inside.

* * *

In the living room, he scuffs his feet against the sheet-protected hardwood floor and grins apologetically. "It's kind of a mess in here," he says, waving a hand towards the ladder, tins of paint, the brushes and a roller.

"You're painting," she says. Redundantly. Under other circumstances it would seem to invite some kind of joke, but none seems to fit.

Instead, after scratching his right ear, he starts to explain. (He picked the habit up from her and it's reserved for her presence.) "I thought about getting a decorator," he says. "But it's my house, you know? I never really had a house, so I figured . . . " He doesn't know now what he figured really. She's pushed all the thoughts out of his head. "It gives me something to do, I guess." He smirks gently, running out of words, resorting at last to misplaced humor. "Keeps me away from evil women who only want me for my body."

Her throat does the gulping thing again - harder this time - and she blushes a furious shade of red.

"God, no . . . " He realizes too late what he just said. "I didn't mean . . . I was talking about me. My past. Hospital, drinking, screwing, back the next day for more." He smiles, trying to make it look appeasing. "I didn't mean you."

She nods and opens her mouth to speak, but she hesitates and, before she can get the words out, he blurts (for no sane reason), "I bought a leaf blower."

Her eyes flicker over his face. Then she says, "It's July."

"Yeah, I know. I just . . ." He glances down, chuckling softly at his own expense. Sometimes he thinks maybe he gets a little too caught up with his house. She's right – it's July and when fall comes he'll probably never even use the leaf blower. He only ever did yard work for Mrs. Shepherd and that was with a lot of bitching and whining and procrastination. But he likes it. He liked buying it. It seemed like a step in the right direction. "I have a huge yard and . . . trees. Big trees with leaves." He shrugs. "So I bought a leaf blower. It's got a four-stroke engine."

"Oh . . .?" She's staring at him now. A little like the way she did when he first got to know her. But it's different. She's lost that innocence - that whole deer in the headlights, doe-eyed _yay!_ thing - and she looks tired. Everyone has to change sometime, he guesses, but it still leaves him a little sad for her. "My dad has a leaf blower."

"Well, you could have told me," he quips lamely. He's _had_ more awkward conversations, but right about now he'd be hard pressed to actually name one. "Thatcher and I could've bonded over our mutual interest in yard debris."

He closes his eyes briefly and dips his head. Awkwardness always did bring out his tactless, stupid-ass side. He used not to give a damn. She changed that (well, she made a dent) and now she's on the receiving end. "Sorry. My bad."

"It's okay," she says in a small voice. "It's okay . . . more than okay, really. I thought you'd forgotten all about us . . . I mean me."

She gives a soft almost-laugh through her nose, then smiles, waiting, while he catches up with the implication. He'd been thinking (when he let himself) it was the other way around.

"You want a beer?" he asks, and she nods and follows him into the kitchen.

* * *

"You have a barbecue." She surveys the backyard over the neck of her fourth bottle of beer.

The conversation hasn't gotten any more revealing, but there's a kind of half way to loaded comfortableness about it.

"Yeah," he says. Defensively. Waiting for what comes next. Truth be told, he bought it with a certain satisfaction. He's only used it once and Derek kept inspecting the ribs before he ate them to see if they were cooked right. But, yeah, there's a certain satisfaction (a pathetic and empty satisfaction, but he's not going there) in proving Addison's low expectations (conveyed by a nurse in an on-call room) wrong.

"Do you . . . do you ever cook on it?" she asks.

"Yes, I cook on it," he snaps, satisfaction instantly dispersing into the realm of denial it came from. "What the hell is it with women and barbecues? You heat the damn thing up and you sling on some meat. There's nothing hard about it. Or playing catch. I played tailback in high school. I can catch a goddamn ball."

She widens her eyes. Clutches her beer to her chest. There she is with the pretty thing again. If he hadn't put all that behind him, she'd take his breath away.

"Sorry," he says. "That was -"

"Addison," she supplies softly. (He remembers, now, telling her - when they still talked about stuff like that.) "And all I meant was . . . maybe you'd barbecue something _now_, because, really, I didn't mean to drink so much beer and all I had for breakfast was toast and I worked through lunch and if I don't eat something I'll throw up or pass out or," she takes a breath, "try to swim in your fishpond."

"I don't have a fishpond," he says, unable to hold in his smile as she unravels into the Lexie he knows and used to love.

"Well, then, go wild and get caught wielding a leaf blower under the influence." She grins, then her eyes plead with him. "Feed me?"

Or should that be still loves? He doesn't know; doesn't want to think about it.

"You want pizza?" he asks, getting up to make the call, calculating the risk of the next question. "Anchovies and pineapple on your half, right?" He pulls the expected disgusted face and hopes this isn't too much history for her, for either of them.

She smiles broadly, pleased that he remembers and her relief is contagious: he smiles back and finds it in himself to tease her. "Some things are impossible to forget." He meant the eccentric pizza toppings, but a trace of regret lines his voice before the sentence is over as its deeper meaning trickles through his understanding. Her eyes search his face for a moment and it's as though she's about to speak, but he turns away and she drops her gaze away from him with a split second's delay that's so close to simultaneous it makes no difference.

As he walks into the house to find the pizza menu, he tries to work out the balance between wishing she'd never come and hoping she won't leave.

* * *

It's dark and the outside lights are on, and they're still sitting there. Her alcohol consumption has slowed, his has risen and a kind of inertia has settled on them. It's enjoyable actually (if you like slow, languid masochism), but it's gone on too long now and Mark sighs. "What do you want, Lexie?"

She takes a nervous sip of her beer. "I just wanted to see you," she says. "I . . . well, you know, we were . . . and I -" She pauses, composing herself, but the rest still comes out in a rush. "I didn't do what you think I did. I wanted to explain but you wouldn't listen and then - " Her words arrest and she swallows (not, this time, the embarrassed gulp, this swallow is pure pain). "George died and I -" She breaks off again, eyes searching his. "I kept thinking you'd . . . be there. In the hospital . . . I kept looking for you. And then, at the funeral . . . but you just stood there, under that big black umbrella, glaring at the ground from your Armani suit -"

"That's what you do at funerals," Mark interrupts gruffly, shrugging. He's only been to two. The first one, Derek's father's, was spent suppressing emotions that the Shepherds didn't need to deal with on top of their own. The second one, this one, was for a guy he hardly knew and, let's face it, never had much time for.

"No," she says. "That's what _you_ do at funerals. But I . . . " Her shoulders fall a little. "It was _George_." She takes a breath. "It was George. And I needed you. And you should have noticed. We had too much for you to glare and ignore me and go back to work and call me Dr. Grey as though I was just another intern. We had too much together and you should have noticed."

Now it's his turn to swallow. "I noticed," he says. He did - he just didn't know what to do about it.

"So why -?"

"You made your feelings very clear." The feeling in his chest is resentment, but his voice, when he says this, is soft. Apparently he doesn't want to hurt her - even when he sort of does. Anyway, he's not sure she ever really did make anything clear; he never really gave her the opportunity. On the other hand, she didn't exactly make an effort.

But then, like she said, O'Malley died. And he? Well, yeah, he was out buying houses.

"I wake up crying," she says, looking anywhere but at Mark. "Whenever I sleep, the last few weeks, I wake up crying and I don't know what I'm crying about." She laughs a little to herself, then lifts her face. "Except today, it turns out I was sharing a on-call room with Derek and when he asked me what was wrong the answer just came out, without thinking, like one of those word-association exercises. _What's wrong, Lexie? - I want Mark_. Not _George died_, or _my mom died_, or _patients die in front of me every day and sometimes I don't know how to look at death one more time without going crazy_. Just," she shrugs gently, "_I want Mark_. So he gave me your address."

He wishes he were a better man, right now. Because a better man would have enough command of himself to say something comforting and discouraging. But he, being him, wants to punish her just a little more. And she's been here long enough now, getting under his skin, that he also wants to hope. "What do you want me for, Lexie?" He's provoking her and the universe. "Scratch the itch?"

"I don't want to be _Dr. Grey_," she says, softly candid, not taking the bait, insisting that he gets the meaning. "And when I wake up crying, I want you to be there."

"You could've had that," he says. "You didn't want -"

"I know," she says. "I didn't. Maybe I still don't. I don't know and I'm sorry for that . . . I just don't know how to . . . _be_, I guess, without you." She pauses. "And I hoped . . . can't we just be us? For a while, anyway. Without . . . plans. Mine or yours." She inhales, letting the breath out again in a long sigh. "Plans don't really seem to work out. I planned to be kick-ass and now I'm crying in on-call rooms." She holds back the threat of tears, adding softly, "And I know for a fact my mom and George both planned to be alive."

Mark doesn't think before he weighs in with,"I'm not going to be your booty call because you had a bad day. I'm past all that . . ." and winces a little as his words trail off. He was going for something real here, about self-respect and higher expectations and moving on and that none of those things are possible if he lets this woman, this woman above all, turn him into someone who's only good for sex. And for a second, he feels justified in the hurt sarcasm at the core of his dumb joke about women only wanting him for his body –- clearly he hit the nail smack on the head. But he winces because it's old and done and his words come out crass and harsh in the midst of all her delicate, messed-up honesty.

"Not . . ." she shakes her head, understanding. "Not that. I just thought . . . can't we keep it just for us?"

He can't help himself (although this time the resentment is half-hearted, because he's caving and because he's thinking he'd like it too if she were there sometimes in the quiet, lonely minutes between waking and mustering the _I've moved on_ mantra): "Wasn't that my line?"

"Yes," she agrees. "And I didn't know it at the time, but you were right."

He narrows his eyes at her, trying to work out which way to jump. What he's telling himself is his better judgment says she's just over-complicating the desire for a nostalgic sympathy fuck; his heart, though, is leaning towards believing her.

"You're confusing," he offers, conceding a little gentleness. "Women are confusing." He laughs quietly and shakes his head once or twice. He's thinking, now, that he drew lines that weren't necessary between him and her; he's thinking that this is the most honest a woman has ever been with him (and the most compatible, because he doesn't know what the fuck he wants or who he is most of the time either, and when he told her he did he was just quoting other people's definitions); he's thinking, again, how pretty she is, sitting there in his yard.

"Confused," she corrects, moving very slightly closer. "Not confusing - confused. At least, I am." She smiles. "But I know I don't want to be _Dr. Grey_ anymore." She bites her lip a little. "I know I miss knowing you. I miss you knowing me."

* * *

Later, he likes to think it's not inevitable that she's sharing his bed, curled into him, back pressed against his stomach, hand lying gently along the leg he's tangled around her.

He can feel the rise and fall of her breath under his hand as she sleeps, he can feel her closeness.

When she cries a little and strains in his arms, he whispers _Lexie_, enfolding her in warmth and sound and touch and it's over in seconds: she barely breaks the barrier between asleep and awake. But she turns around and blinks and briefly, sleepily touches his face, and he lets it sink in, deeper than doubt or self-protection, that he missed knowing her too.


End file.
